Elergy for a Garden

15 Jul '07 7:51 pm

I want to tell you a story. As you can see from the title, it is a sad story. But don’t skip ahead to see how it ends.

It is the story of my last day in Europe. Of the one really wacky and extravagant event I allowed myself. And of how the internet, like Fate in the story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, can seemingly promise you the earth whilst stealing from you that which is most precious. (By the way – I am intentionally melodramatic here. Crying or Very sad

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It so happens that when planning my trip to Europe, the cheapest way to get to Aberdeen, where I heard my friend Sally sing Lucia for Scottish Opera, was Air France via Paris to Dublin and then Ryanair to Aberdeen. Great. That meant the opportunity to see a bit of Ireland on my return, a country I have often dreamt of visiting. And being the gardener I am, to visit an Irish garden… So I started researching – a slow and fascinating process. And settled on Jim Reynolds’ Butterstream Gardens in County Meath near the town of Trim.

I remembered reading his passionate and self-depreciating comments in the wonderful book by Sybil Connolly and Helen Dillon, “In an Irish Garden”, first published in 1986. Further research on the web revealed new developments as he pushed further from the house: the original Sissinghurst inspired intimate spaces flooded with plants now included a grand French double canal axis complete with matching pavilions. Here was someone gardening beyond his means in a way which really made me look like a beginner! I had to see his garden!

This is what he had to say on the web:

It started innocently enough. There was no grand vision of Arcadia, no hint of an all-absorbing passion, no trumpets sounded in my ear - just the heaving and thud of a piece of clay being double-dug in preparation for the reception of a dozen hybrid tea roses.

This irrational urge to possess a few roses had come quite suddenly. While I had enjoyed helping to plant wallflowers and summer bedding as a child, I had during schooldays been a most reluctant gardener, baulking at the prospect of involvement with anything requiring physical exertion. By my early twenties the prospect of a little light dabbling in the garden seemed attractive enough: pruning, dead-heading and a spot of gentle weeding would not be too demanding, I thought.

I soon became a garden visitor. Mount Stewart, Birr Castle and Ilnacullin - all on a suitable grand scale -were favourite destinations. In Britain, Crathes and Sissinghurst provided inspiration. My horizons began to expand quickly and I realised that even a young chap with nothing more than a dozen roses could learn an immense amount about the principles of design, layout and planting.

These new-found notions and theories would have been of little use had there not been some ground on which to make a garden. I was particularly fortunate in growing up on a farm, so mere was some space available for these early horticultural experiments and nobody particularly objected to my enclosing the corner of a field. As I became more ambitious (more foolish, my friends thought), the fence migratedfarther and farther out into the field.

From the early 1970s a series of small compartments evolved. The site, being long and narrow, particularly lent itself to division, and as I began to collect plants and to concentrate on matters of design it seemed most reasonable and logical to devote different areas to particular plants or colour schemes.

In the beginning my ventures were greatly enlivened by the frequent visits of stampeding cattle or by browsing horses whose special delight was to pull recently planted shrubs and trees from the ground, chew on them a bit and then discard them. Other rural delights missed by town gardeners were the visits of the rabbits and hares. They shared things very fairly.

Knowing nothing, I naively assumed that I could grow anything that took my fancy: a few camellias, acacias, lots of rhododendrons, an embothrium or two. The possibilities seemed endless, or so the horticultural literature seemed to imply. After all, this is Ireland, we have a mild climate and we are: renowned for our Robinsonian gardens It did not take very long to learn that the Irish midlands are not suited at all to these things: the ungrateful persisted in dying. The soil is a heavy limestone clay and there is generally hard winter frost.

These setbacks did little to disenchant me, but were, I soon realised, a decided advantage and saved me from the dreaded fate of making a rhododendron garden supplemented with conifers and heathers for added boredom. I thoroughly agree with the late Russell Page's summary of most large rhododendron collections as being as artistically interesting as a wallpaper catalogue. Instead I came to the joys of roses old and new - enormous and sprawling like the delicious pink 'Belvedere Rambler' (common in old Irish gardens) or the delectable little Edwardian 'Natalie Nypels' - flowering shrubs and small trees, foliage plants and most importantly of all the unending range and variety of herbaceous perennials. There were choice and tasty pickings to be found in old gardens, particularly m old walled gardens around the country: shrub roses that had long ago lost their names and lots of tantalising herbaceous plants. The candelabra primulas, ‘Lissadel Pink' and ‘Asthore'; the startling alpine thistle, Eryngium alpinium ‘Slieve Donard'; and numerous choice old crocosmias and campanulas are just a few almost forgotten plants which were to be found. As a plant collector it would be so easy to end up with a jumble of horticultural misfits and oddities and no doubt some would find comets here which begin to resemble cabinets of curiosities I try to be rigid on matters of design and of colour, always bearing in mind that a garden should be an aesthetic or even sensual experience with a careful buildup of drama and excitement, interspersed with pauses leading to new expectations and eventually to a suitably timed climax. While each garden room at Butterstream is complete in itself with its own particular mood and planting, the eye is drawn onwards by the sight of a gate, an urn or a pavilion until the final comer is rounded and the grand finale comes into view. This is a small Tuscan temple reflected in a lily pool set in a wide pavement and surrounded by formal lines of box and terracotta pots, providing an evocation of a different world - a villa garden in Pompeii.

After 20 years of five to nine gardening (the best part of the day from nine to five was spent as an archaeologist of sorts), I decided that the garden should begin to keep me. Having worked single- handed for so long it was time to have a little help and this would be paid for by opening to the public, It is rather nice to note that the Good Gardens Guide has been pleased to honour my efforts with their highest accolade, two stars. Some think that my head will never again fit through the door.)

Nature must take much of the credit. Many things have succeeded in spite of me and the overall result has been beyond my expectations. My hope is that visitors will be inspired to be more adventurous and daring in their own gardens. It really is the greatest fun.

Jim Reynolds

Things become ever stranger; I have just checked the 2006 Good Gardens Guide (acquired for £4 on a sale in Scotland but not yet consulted): there are seven two-star gardens in Ireland; Butterstream is not even mentioned. Then I followed back the link from which I first recorded the above info in February. The following has been added in red above the article – and note the date:
The Garden is now closed and, according to a recorded announcement, will not reopen at any time in the future. (25/5/2004)

By now you know I never met Jim Reynolds, or got to see his garden as he intended it to be seen. But I did see it. However, here, first, is a pictorial introduction so that you can understand my expectations… all these pictures I found on the web.

15 Jul '07 9:39 pm

The instructions on how to get there – even THAT I found, enigmatically, on the web three days before arriving! – simply took one on a road out of Trim. So when I reached the next village I stopped to ask the way. “Nay,” said the woman sadly, “’twas ever so beautiful, but they closed it eighteen months ago and it’s become a housing estate…”

Fighting anger even more than disappointment, I set off to see what might have been saved. Perhaps it was all being preserved I argued. But I found a construction site, and very little sign that anyone had even removed any plants of value before bashing a road through the heart of the garden. In the remnants I first I saw the clematis, growing defiantly across everything. Then the last rose blooms. Double box hedges, overgrown, almost touching in the centre, hiding the path beneath. I started seeing patterns in the overgrowth. I identified choice plants, and cheeky ones that were taking over. But through it all the slash of the new entrance road being built, bulldozed defiantly against the beauty, clay earth lying puddled and lifeless, a mockery of the richness it once supported.

My initial dejection turned to a wish to dig out plants and find them new homes. I had a ridiculous vision of chartering a plane to return my spoils triumphantly to Africa. I felt the greed of the looter. And realized that I could do no more than take a few photographs, and write on the forum, and try to pay tribute to a garden, and a gardener, and a dream that went, seemingly unmourned, the way of all dreams…

Isolda’s Tower. Isolda’s Liebestod – ‘love in death’. Could it be that the theme of Wagner’s opera, that true love can not exist on this world, only in dying together, could be applied to this garden? To any garden? That the dream will always be greater, more glorious, more perfect than the reality?

Try as I might, I can’t convince myself. Yet I do find a poetic solace in that over it all, and perhaps even to be resurrected as a gatehouse, broods the forlorn figure of the tower Jim Reynolds called Isolda’s Tower.

16 Jul '07 6:21 am

I think we all recognize our own inevitable demise and everything we would create in this story. I have little prospect of creating half so grand a garden vision as he did and if his can't survive without him what chance has mine? Of course there are exceptions. Some are preserved here by the Garden Conservancy or by provisions made by their owners (and, sometimes, creators). however, the total isn't substantial next to all the gardeners there are and their gardens. Just as happens at every funeral I attend, along with the sadness comes a strong, present centeredness and the recognition of the preciousness of each moment.

I'm reminded too of the feeling I had as a child after being totally involved in creating something with friends and brothers, inevitably would come the call to come back inside. We were always reluctant to do so and protested that we had just completed making some thing or other and had only just begun to play with it. Of course the most important aspect of the play had been the creative process, not the enjoyment of the ensuing object.

So here's too Jim Reynold's whose lasting achievement may have been his fine example of how to live a satifying life through the creation of his garden. His was a wonderful garden. May we all be inspired by both his life and garden to act on our own creative urges right up until the moment we too are "called in".

Welcome back Jack.

16 Jul '07 9:18 am

Yes, it is a sad story and the nightmare of many gardeners. Why do we labour to create these little Edens when they face the possitility of paradise lost when we move on (one way or the other)? I think it is best as Mark said to just enjoy each moment in our gardens without thought to the future. We create our own vision of Heaven on earth purely for our own enjoyment anyway, so what happens after we are gone is really irrelevant. I am only sorry that you were disappointed at missing something you had been so excited about seeing.

We are all really happy to have you back in your own personal paradise.

Elergy for a Garden

Elergy for a Garden

Part Two: Isolda's Tower

Sad not to have met the man and be shown the garden by him.

Welcome back Jack